Congrats Brian Green!
Hi, I'm Brian Green, and I live in Farmington, Utah (about halfway between Salt Lake City and Ogden) with my wife and my 17 year old daughter.
When I first got out of college, I worked in social work, running a homeless shelter and working in a refugee relocation center with unaccompanied minors, first as a linestaff, then as a teacher (English as a Second Language and also content courses). I learned to speak Vietnamese while working with the refugees and also got interested in computers (which led to my next career path in programming). I'm now a consultant (specializing in search engine implementation), so I usually either travel all over the country or work from my home (in the basement, where my office shares space with my Mr Beer equipment). When I travel, I often try to get beer that isn't available around here (not too tough with the limited selection here).
I bought my first Mr Beer kit when they were on sale on woot.com for $19.99. That was about the same time it became legal to brew in Utah (before that, it was legal to buy and sell supplies, but technically not legal to brew, although I don't think the law was enforced). My initial motivation for brewing my own was to make beers with higher alcohol content than the 3.2% here (there's stronger beer available, but it's only in state run stores and is sold by the bottle for far too much). That led to a few batches made with too much sugar before I stopped chasing ABV and also started adding DME, then LME when I found out how cheap it is if I buy it in bulk at the LHBS. Interestingly, as I started going for taste more than alcohol, the alcohol content in my brews went up.
Up until very recently, I had never done anything but pure extract brewing, but recently made my first partial mash. It's carbing now.
Most of my batches start with a Mr Beer standard refill (I stocked up in the after Christmas sale), to which I add LME and hops. I don't follow real recipes. I just measure out some extract and hops and use Qbrew to get a BU:GU ratio that seems good to me. I keep track of my batches in a spreadsheet so I know what worked and what didn't.
I've recently made a few batches with coriander and orange extract, but other than that, I don't drift too far from malt and hops (and booster if I started with a standard refill). I'm not much of a hophead and tend to prefer beers that are in the balanced to slightly malty range.
I've now got two fermenters, but I don't always have enough time to brew, so one of them is often empty (sometimes both).
How long have you been brewing?
I started my first batch on 5/2/2009 and had two fermenters before the end of June.
What is your favorite beer?
Before I started brewing my own, I was fine with just about any light lager (even Natural Ice). Now, I don't really know what my favorite beer is. There's a local brewery (Uinta) that has a Blue Sky Pilsner and a Solstice Kolsch that I like. And for home brews, I think my favorite would start with HCCD and I'd add about 1/2 oz Cascade hops and 1-3 lbs of LME.
Who would you most like to share a beer with?
This has to be the toughest question. Really just about any of the borg (including some who haven't visited in a while), but especially Mcgrewc, because I wanted to be an author but didn't have the courage to follow through, Yankeedag because of the sheer volume of help he's given on the forums, Drock because he was really patient with me when I first started and SiriusDG because I think our taste in beer is similar (and I think he'd get a kick out of coming someplace where he'd be considered a Gentile).
